Written by Chelsea Reid
The scents of summer, including freshly cut grass, grilling hamburgers, and a faint taste of chlorine from the swimming pool, fill my nostrils as I stroll around my neighborhood in the evening. These are also the scents of my teenage summers, and they bring back memories of spending Friday nights at the neighborhood pool with my friends and our families seated around picnic tables in between swims. I always grin when I think back on the memories.
I shouldn’t be shocked to feel this pleasant glow because I work as a social psychologist.My research focuses on nostalgia, which is the nostalgic yearning for special times in our own pasts, and how it is connected to our sense of wellbeing and interpersonal connection.
Nostalgia, triggered by sensory stimuli like music, fragrances, and foods, can mentally take us back in time. This could relate to significant events, victories, and—most importantly—moments involving close friends, family, and other significant individuals in our life.
It turns out that we are benefiting from this experience.
How the concept of nostalgia evolved
Nostalgia was deemed unhealthy for ages.
Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, researched mercenaries in the lowlands of France and Italy in the 1600s who yearned for their mountain homelands. He invented the term “nostalgia” and linked it to a mental illness after observing their tears and despair. This opinion, which remained prevalent throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, was shared by other intellectuals of the day.
However, early philosophers erred by supposing that unpleasant symptoms were being caused by nostalgia. Perhaps it was the other way around. Grief and loneliness are examples of unpleasant events that might evoke nostalgia, which can subsequently help people deal with these difficulties more skillfully.
Researchers now consider nostalgia to be a source of psychological well-being and a largely good, albeit bittersweet, emotional experience. Crucially, scientific studies have backed up this opinion.
How nostalgia inspires connection and belonging
The advantages of nostalgia are numerous. It makes people feel more inspired and upbeat and improves their self-perception. People have a stronger feeling of purpose in life when they experience nostalgia.
Particularly strong evidence supports nostalgia’s positive societal effects. People who experience nostalgia are more empathetic and inclined to help those around them by participating at community activities and making charitable contributions.
By strengthening sentiments of being loved, linked, protected, and trusted by others, nostalgia also helps people feel more socially connected to their loved ones. Nostalgia improves relationship pleasure and makes people feel more comfortable in their intimate connections.
Although it is a universal feeling, nostalgia is also very personal. Depending on our individual experiences, the things that make us nostalgic and the things that could make us nostalgic can differ from person to person. However, identical stimuli may evoke nostalgia in members of the same culture. For example, in a 2013 study, my team discovered that among a range of scents, American participants picked pumpkin pie spice as the one that most evoked reminiscence.
The nostalgic power of scents and foods
The power of meals and smells to evoke nostalgia was discussed by French novelist Marcel Proust in 1922. He talked eloquently about how the scent and taste of a tea-soaked cake took him back to his early years spent with his aunt at her house and village. These days, this kind of experience is frequently called the Proust effect.
What Proust outlined has been validated by science. The brain regions connected to emotions and autobiographical memory are intimately related to our olfactory system, which is the sensory system that gives us our sense of smell. Tastes and smells work together to give us a sense of flavor.
Additionally, foods are frequently the focal point of social events, which makes them readily connected to these recollections. For example, without slices of luscious watermelon, some people might feel that a summer BBQ is lacking something. Additionally, handmade pumpkin pie might be a staple on many Thanksgiving dinner tables. The watermelon or pie may then act as what social psychologists refer to as social surrogates, which are meals that, because they were consumed at previous times with loved ones, act as stand-ins for important relationships.
Together with my research team, I sought to understand how people profited from experiencing nostalgia when they came across the foods and smells of their past. In order to select 12 volunteers for our study, we first exposed them to 33 different smells in 2011. Some odors, such baby powder and pumpkin pie spice, were assessed as strongly evoking memories by participants, while others, like money and coffee, were ranked as less so.
More pleasant emotions, higher self-esteem, a stronger sense of connection to their former selves, optimism, a stronger sense of social connectivity, and a stronger sense of purpose in life were all experienced by those who smelled the scents more nostalgically.
When we investigated food nostalgia, we reached similar findings. Comparing our participants’ feelings of nostalgia for foods to those of prior research participants for fragrances and songs, it appeared that foods were more strongly associated with nostalgia than either scent or music. More recently, we discovered that nostalgic foods are reassuring and that people find them so because they bring back memories of significant or meaningful times spent with their loved ones.
Balancing benefits and trade-offs
There are various methods to express our nostalgia through food, even though it can be linked to things like cookies and hamburgers that are best consumed in moderation.
Healthy foods allow us to experience nostalgia. Orange slices, for example, bring back memories of halftime at soccer games when I was a kid. Additionally, watermelon evokes strong feelings of nostalgia in many people, including our research participants. For Chinese participants, tofu is a nostalgic dish, according to other experts.
However, there are still methods to enjoy nostalgia without sacrificing health when it does require eating bad foods. We discovered that individuals benefited from food-evoked nostalgia simply by writing and picturing the foods—consumption was not required. Drawing on comforting foods has been shown by other researchers to improve wellbeing. People can enjoy their food while consuming less calories by deliberately eating even less healthful foods.
Nostalgia, which was once thought to be harmful to our health, offers us many benefits. We may be able to support our mental and physical well-being with nostalgic foods.
Chelsea Reid teaches psychology at the College of Charleston as an associate professor.
